Wednesday, April 29, 2015

The most racist places in America, according to Google

Where do America's most racist people live? "The rural Northeast and South," suggests a new study just published in PLOS ONE.

The
paper introduces a novel but
makes-tons-of-sense-when-you-think-about-it method for measuring the
incidence of racist attitudes: Google search data.
The methodology comes from data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.
He's used it before to measure the effect of racist attitudes on Barack Obama's electoral prospects.

"Google data, evidence suggests, are unlikely to suffer from major social censoring," Stephens-Davidowitz wrote in a previous paper. "Google searchers
are online and likely alone, both of which make it easier to express
socially taboo thoughts. Individuals, indeed, note that they are
unusually forthcoming with Google." He also notes that the Google
measure correlates strongly with other standard measures social science
researchers have used to study racist attitudes.

For
the PLOS ONE paper, researchers looked at searches containing the
N-word. People search frequently for it, roughly as often as searches
for "migraine(s)," "economist," "sweater," "Daily Show," and
"Lakers." (The authors attempted to control for variants of the N-word
not necessarily intended as pejoratives, excluding the "a" version of
the word that analysis revealed was often used "in different contexts
compared to searches of the term ending in '-er'.")

It's
also important to note that not all people searching for the N-word are
motivated by racism, and that not all racists search for that word,
either. But aggregated over several years and several million searches,
the data give a pretty good approximation of where a particular type of
racist attitude is the strongest.

Interestingly,
on the map above the most concentrated cluster of racist searches
happened not in the South, but rather along the spine of the
Appalachians running from Georgia all the way up to New York and
southern Vermont.

Other
hotbeds of racist searches appear in areas of the Gulf Coast,
Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and a large portion of Ohio. But
the searches get rarer the further West you go. West of Texas, no region
falls into the "much more than average" category. This map follows the
general contours of a map of racist Tweets made by researchers at Humboldt State University.

So
some people are sitting at home by themselves, Googling a bunch of
racist stuff. What does it matter? As it turns out, it matters quite a
bit. The researchers on the PLOS ONE paper found that racist searches
were correlated with higher mortality rates for blacks, even after
controlling for a variety of racial and socio-economic variables.

"Results
from our study indicate that living in an area characterized by a one
standard deviation greater proportion of racist Google searches is
associated with an 8.2% increase in the all-cause mortality rate among
Blacks," the authors conclude. Now, of course, Google searches aren't
directly leading to the deaths of African Americans. But previous
research has shown that the prevalence of racist attitudes can
contribute to poor health and economic outcomes among black residents.

"Racially
motivated experiences of discrimination impact health via diminished
socioeconomic attainment and by enforcing patterns in racial residential
segregation, geographically isolating large segments of the Black
population into worse neighborhood conditions," the authors write,
summarizing existing research. "Racial discrimination in employment can
also lead to lower income and greater financial strain, which in turn
have been linked to worse mental and physical health outcomes."

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On the campaign trail...with my wife Rita

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Faculty Senate Chair

Serving as Mace Bearer during the Inauguration of Michael T. Benson as EKU's 12th president.

Teaching

EDF 203 in EKU's one-room schoolhouse.

Professin'

Lecturing on the history of Berea College to Berea faculty and staff, 2014.

Faculty Regent

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